Nigeria Security Tracker
from Africa Program and Nigeria on the Brink

Nigeria Security Tracker

The Council on Foreign Relations' Nigeria Security Tracker was an effort to catalog and map political violence based on a weekly survey of Nigerian and international press. The last update to the tracker was July 1, 2023. The data presented included violent incidents related to political, economic, and social grievances directed at the state or other affiliated groups (or, conversely, the state employing violence to respond to those incidents.)

Last updated July 1, 2023 1:30 pm (EST)

Tracker

The Nigeria Security Tracker (NST) was a project of the Council on Foreign Relations' Africa program. It documented and mapped violence in Nigeria motivated by political, economic, or social grievances. The data was updated through July 1, 2023.

 

 

Methodology

More From Our Experts

The Nigeria Security Tracker (NST) tracked violence both causal and symptomatic of Nigeria’s political instability and citizen alienation. The data was based on weekly surveys of Nigerian and international media through July 1, 2023.

More on:

Nigeria

Wars and Conflict

Conflict Prevention

Boko Haram

Violent Nonstate Actors

The data started with May 29, 2011, the date of Goodluck Jonathan’s inauguration as president. It was an event that highlighted the increasing bifurcation of the country on regional and religious lines.

Relying on press reports of violence presents methodological limitations. There is a dearth of accurate reporting across certain regions, death tolls are imprecise, and accounts of incidents vary. There is the potential for political manipulation of media. Given these limitations, the NST made every effort to collect information from multiple sources. Nevertheless, NST statistics should be viewed as indicative rather than definitive. Download the whole dataset as an excel spreadsheet here.

The Nigeria Security Tracker was edited by Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Studies Michelle Gavin.

More From Our Experts

More on:

Nigeria

Wars and Conflict

Conflict Prevention

Boko Haram

Violent Nonstate Actors

Creative Commons
Creative Commons: Some rights reserved.
Close
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.
View License Detail
Close

Top Stories on CFR

United States

Each Friday, I look at what the presidential contenders are saying about foreign policy. This Week: Joe Biden doesn’t want one of America’s closest allies to buy a once iconic American company.

Immigration and Migration

Dara Lind, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, sits down with James M. Lindsay to discuss the record surge in migrants and asylum seekers crossing the U.S. southern border.

Center for Preventive Action

Every January, CFR’s annual Preventive Priorities Survey analyzes the conflicts most likely to occur in the year ahead and measures their potential impact. For the first time, the survey anticipates that this year, 2024, the United States will contend not only with a slew of global threats, but also a high risk of upheaval within its own borders. Is the country prepared for the eruption of election-related instability at home while wars continue to rage abroad?